Located just North of Austin, Texas, Pickleland plans on opening its doors in June of 2024. Boasting nine indoor courts, this brand new club has its sights set on creating the best experience possible for its players while retaining fair rates for its members. As we approach this club’s grand opening in the coming weeks, Alejandro Rioja, CEO and founder of Pickleland, gives us an inside scoop of the club’s origins, aims, and philospohy, including their plan to reach near max capacity before the first player even walks in the building.
Pickleball Club Mag: Can you please give a brief description of your club, Pickleland?
Alejandro Rioja: Pickleland is a 9-court indoor pickleball facility located North of Austin. We traveled across the country to play at the best facilities and brought all the elements we liked to Pickleland. When we decided to build the facility, we interviewed over 100+ players asking them what they liked about the places they frequented, which amenities they loved, and what perks were important. We are building Pickleland through this user-centric approach not just for the building itself, but also for our programming formats, offers, and more.
PCM: What led to the decision to ultimately start a club in the location that you did?
AR: We took about 4-6 months to nail down our location. What we were looking for was a location that was affordable from a rent perspective (so that we can provide the best value for our customers), easy to build on from a permitting perspective, and a location that can still draw from a large pool of customers (We have more than 300k people in a 5-mile radius, many in our ideal demographic). We think that our location at 21427 Martin Lane, Pflugerville, TX 78660 hits on all those points. As an aside, downtown Austin has a lot of great pickleball options but the pricing players pay is greatly affected by the rent businesses need to pay. We also felt that opening yet another place downtown would be more competitive than it needed to be, downtown offered limited options for properly spaced courts and had lengthy permitting processes.
PCM: Why is it important to you to offer lower membership rates at your club?
AR: More than low rates I think what will set us apart will be higher value. Our goal is to stack up against our geographical competitors and come ahead in many variables, pricing being one of them, but also customer service, the quality of our courts, the variety of our programming, etc. We hope customers choose us and decide to drive the extra 10-15 min given the better quality games and experience they can get. I personally do that currently (drive further for better courts and games, even though there are closer options available to me).
PCM: What kind of strategies are you hoping to implement in order to be a profitable business with lower membership rates?
AR: We are investing heavily on CRO (conversion rate optimization), how our copy can help translate the value we provide to our customers, and offering high quality lessons and tournaments. We are also investing heavily in customer feedback and satisfaction. Acquiring a customer is the first step, but retention is equally if not more important. We want to create many happy customers that bring us referrals through word of mouth. This is how we plan to build a long-lasting pickleball brand. Lastly, we plan to create a blueprint for all the higher revenue-driving opportunities such as leagues, tournaments, and events so that we can scale them profitably. We are partnering with the top organizers to learn from them how to run the highest quality programming.
PCM: Can you briefly give us a layout of your club? (# of courts, indoor and/or outdoor, concessions, pro shop, etc)
AR: 9 indoor courts, finished with outdoor surfacing, fully fenced, padded walls, a pro shop, a concession area with fridges, snacks, and a mezzanine area for corporate events, birthdays and parties. We are also partnering up with food trucks to park outside of our facility.
PCM: What does both short-term and long-term success look like for your club?
AR: Our immediate short-term goal is to open near capacity. We’ve managed to sign up a great number of members through word-of-mouth, SEO, and social media ads as well as the fact that our staff is well-connected in the Austin pickleball space since we play every day. Our long-term goal is to become a pillar in Austin that people go and say “That’s the best place to play in Austin”. When we achieve this, we hope to open a 2nd location in South Austin.
PCM: What have you seen from other successful clubs that you specifically are hoping to implement in your club and why?
AR: We have had the opportunity to think about this facility from the ground up. That means that we get to choose the perfect frosted lights at the right locations, the proper size of our courts, we don’t have to deal with columns in the middle, and more. Every decision we’ve made has been vetted through the lens of “Does this improve or hurt the player experience?” We removed any fluff that only adds cost to membership and splurged in the best court surface, fencing, programming, and community building – the key items that any facility must absolutely get right. From a programming perspective, we are offering options such as Singles (1-1) open play, family open play, and many other formats. We are also having dark-colored walls to help contrast the ball better.
PCM: What have you seen from other clubs that you are going to avoid implementing and why?
AR:
Complicated pricing structures and ugly websites:
Coming from the SaaS world, I want to provide an easy, straightforward yet still friendly interface on our site. I find that the majority of the clubs use websites that are hard to use and look at.
Glow in the dark:
We actually flew to a facility just to attend their glow-in-the-dark night. We found it cool for about 30 seconds and then the novelty wore off. It was very challenging to see the ball which made rallies last very few hits. We asked people how they felt about it and they mentioned it was “gimmicky”. We decided not to incur in the cost of adding blacklights to our facility (which ran about $80k) so that we don’t have to pass that (unnecessary) cost to our customers.
A dedicated chef’s kitchen:
One of the big decisions we needed to make early on was whether or not to build out a kitchen in our facility. Permitting and costs aside, which can run into the $100s of thousands, we found this to be an operational burden we did not want to incur. We figured people wouldn’t be visiting Pickleland because we had good burgers. We wanted to attract loyal customers who kept coming back because of the top-tier pickleball experience they can get daily.
Poorly spaced or not properly fenced courts:
To us, there’s nothing more disappointing than having to end a rally because of an incoming ball from another court, or not having enough space on the baseline to serve or return.
PCM: How are you going about hiring your staff for a brand-new club? Has hiring been easy or difficult?
AR: We’ve been lucky to have a lot of inbound inquiries from the pickleball community. For example, I met my Director of Pickleball (Jeff Lee) while playing pickleball and we instantly hit it off. He was the most excited person I had met up to that point about our specific location (since he lives only a few minutes away). Unpromptedly, he kept texting me ideas and suggestions for a week and at some point, I suggested we grab dinner to just chat. He said he wanted to be involved in whatever fashion would add value to the business and thus we found a perfect fit for him as our Director of Pickleball. I’ve been an entrepreneur before so I have also brought my marketing and sales team into Pickleland. This has been great since they already have a lot of context on how I like to work and the standards of work that we need to deliver. Our investors have also been a great source of help lending their expertise in construction, operations, and marketing.
PCM: How did you choose your suppliers or equipment?
AR: Every item that we have brought into Pickleland whether it’s the padding, the surfacing, or the lights has been carefully vetted by us going into a real-world application of said product and testing it out for ourselves. For example, when we were evaluating light fixtures, we drove to the facilities that used the lights that we liked and saw how they played. We booked a court and tested lobs for an hour. We studied how the placement of the lights in relation to the court (middle vs ends) affects visibility and gameplay. We brought those nuanced pickleball learnings to our architect and engineer, and together crafted and sourced the materials that best met our standards and vision for the space.
PCM: Are you discouraged or encouraged by all the other facilities popping up around you?
AR: Currently (as of April 2024) Austin remains underserved in terms of the number of courts. If you go to any rec center or public court, you will see several stacks of people still waiting 20-30+ min for a game. We presume (and have validated through our interviews) that a portion of those players will be willing to pay to reduce their wait time and play at better courts. However, we understand that there’s a big investment coming with other franchises coming to town, so we know that in an efficient market, eventually, we will have just the right amount of supply. (There could be a transition period of overbuilding but see my next point on why we remain optimistic). We believe competition makes for a better end product which ultimately benefits the consumer. Only the courts that can deliver a good experience, operate efficiently, and at an affordable price will be able to survive (It’s like how Google was, at one point, one of the many search engines, but now they are the only one lasting thanks to offering a superior experience). We believe that if we are able to execute and deliver our customer-centric service, we will be one of the facilities that last.
PCM: Is there anything else you would like to add?
AR: If you are a sponsor, pickleball apparel/equipment company, etc please reach out via our website! We would love to chat and explore a partnership. If you live in Austin, come check us out in June!
